You wouldn’t guess Wayne Maines’ story by looking at him. The brewpub we’re sitting in has just opened and there aren’t many lunch customers even though it’s tourist season in Portland, ME. Dressed in a button-up shirt, Maines eyes me and my voice recorder cautiously as we chat.

Rose McGowan’s Twitter account was suspended overnight after she spent the past few days exposing the systematic sexual abuse of women in the entertainment industry. McGowan had most recently told Ben Affleck to “fuck off,” called Harvey Weinstein a “POS,” and called for the board of the Weinstein Company to be…

“I definitely spend way more time reading tweets than writing tweets,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross in 2011. Back then, his company was enjoying praise for its (largely accidental) role in helping to organize the Arab Spring, with Stone describing himself as “an infrequent tweeter” and a…

On Wednesday, Tinder introduced a new “Reactions” feature which lets users send each other a range of animated emoji. And in support of this feature, the dating app has launched a bizarre new campaign to explain how these cutesy animations are the solution to skeezy behavior online.

The European Union is still not satisfied with how leading tech companies are handling the removal of illegal content online. On Thursday, it released a new set of guidelines for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Microsoft, giving them just months to shape up—or face unspecified future regulation.

Nazi-saluting white nationalist Richard Spencer—who coined the term “alt-right”—had his Twitter account reinstated, along with verification. In mid-November, Spencer was suspended from the site along with other prominent alt-right voices like Pax Dickinson and Ricky Vaughn.

On Sunday, the European Commission warned Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube and Microsoft that if the companies do not address their hate speech problems, the EU will enact legislation that will force them to do so.

Since the beginning of the internet, online harassment has been a problem. We created this big, beautiful digital landscape that lets people be completely unfiltered, and we all do different things with this freedom. I, for example, use my platform to make sex memes and lightly neg Silicon Valley billionaires. Others…

Online harassment is a serious, but tough problem to try and solve. There is a need for a new system that can ease the burden on moderators who have to comb through those reports. As someone who was once responsible for doing that for a local news station (a much smaller venue than, say, Twitter), I can sympathize…

JK Rowling has always been outspoken about her politics on Twitter. The Harry Potter author is a vocal supporter of Britain’s Labour Party, and she donated nearly a million pounds to the “No Campaign,” which fought to keep Scotland from becoming an independent nation.

I. "Hey Anna, do you like pizza?" I was just sitting down to dinner one evening this past November when I looked through some new Twitter notifications on my phone. My night, I realized regretfully, was about to get very, very stupid.

Preliminary results from a study of online harassment reveal that the most popular venue for harassment, stalking and other abuse is Facebook. And it's fairly common for online harassers to target their victims for over a year.

One of the stickiest issues in the conversation about combating online harassment is the fact that it's, you know, online. The perpetrator is inside the victim's computer, not under their bed. It's easy for law enforcement and the public at large to dismiss cyber-stalking as "just trolling," as "boys will be boys," as…